Been reading a lot this summer but trying to focus as much as possible on reading during this quiet time because, as past years suggest, I will have limited time once fall is here. So not writing here or doing much else this time of year.
Some books I've had on my summer reading list but haven't managed to get to yet include:
The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians. Since we made it to New York a couple of weeks ago, I've been intrigued by the idea of a book telling the history of one neighborhood, Greenwich Village.
Miguel Marmol: simply because I've not read anything by a Salvadorean author before and this "Latin American classic" seems like it could be interesting.
The Bridge of Beyond: I love Guadaloupe. Maryse Conde was our grand prize winner a number of years back and since I've read a couple of her works, I've been waiting for another book from the island to fall into my lap. So I'm excited about this upcoming publication. Plus anything by NYRB is going to be cool...
So far the highlight of my summer reading has been Daytripper, a graphic novel by two Brazilian artists (brothers, no less), Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. The book is a revelation: funny, serious, moving, beautifully drawn and terribly entertaining. It tells the life story of a Brazilian writer as he imagines different deaths for himself, considering his complex relationship with his father, his mother, and his best friend. It's really a lovely story and I can't recommend it highly enough...
Hope everyone's summer is moving along without incident!
So we're off to NYC for several days next weekend and, as I am often wont to do before I travel to New York (or just about anywhere, in fact), I want to read fiction set there. I picked up this excellent edition (with an introduction by 2013 Blue Met Grand Prize winner, Colm Tóibín, no less!) of The New York Stories of Henry James. It's been slow-going.
I'm a fan of Henry James but, first, it's hard to read such dense and heavy text on a hot summer day when people are riding by my balcony on bicycles and dogs are barking in the sunshine. It feels too weighty, requires too much concentration. I read the first three stories with some effort but after finishing the third one, I just couldn't bring myself to continue. At least not for now.
Why does Henry James feel like a cold autumn afternoon writer? Or a stay-in-bed-and-drink-hot-chocolate-while-it-snows writer?
The other reason I couldn't make it work this week is that though the stories are all connected to (not all set there) New York, Henry James is not the kind of writer that revels in space. No long passages about taking the train or sitting in a park people-watching (or at least not in the three stories I read). You get no sense of life in New York (not "common life" at any rate) from reading the stories. Henry James' interests lie inside: in the psychology of human interactions, motivations, fears, secrets. That's fine but because of that fact, I think, the "New York" side of this collection feel rather arbitrary and Tóibín's contextualizing James within the New York of his day is about the only time in the collection where New York really features as part of the stories.
I should dig out my old copy of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, a real New York kind of novel...
At the end of his life, when writer Isaac Babel wrote a speech, indirectly staring Stalin's censors down, he did so with his usual ironic humour and sarcasm. He suggested that "bad writing" was a right that all writers had and a right that the Soviet authorities were refusing to allow. His irony was one that was not lost on his audience: "Let's not fool ourselves: this is a very important right, and to take this right from us is no small thing...let us give up this right, and may God help us. And if there is no God, let us help ourselves."
Babel's humour was his ultimate, most effective, weapon. Later he would suggest that he was practising a new genre, the genre of silence, another dig at Stalin sealed his fate.
I've been thinking and reading about Isaac Babel lately because of the Segal Centre's upcoming production of "Tales from Odessa," a production that was commissioned for the centre and the Yiddish Theatre company, based on the short stories of Babel.
Babel is a writer I've been reading since I was a teenager (one day I will write about how I was this non-Jewish kid growing up in rural America, fascinated with Jewish writers like Singer, Aleichem, Babel and others. One day when I was a little kid, I remember asking my father "What is a Jew?" and he told me that Jews wore funny hats and didn't eat pork. I found this absolutely enthralling.), but only lately have I been revisiting him as an adult, thinking about his tragic life and his unusual sense of humour from the perspective of someone in his 40s.
What I especially like about Babel's stories is the fact that they, like all good writing, are both a snapshot of a time and place vanished forever, but also capture something essential about being a kid, about being a member of a community, about family relations, but unlike Singer or Aleichem, his relationship to his own Judaism is complex and the Jews in his story are largely secular, often brutal or aggressive (one of his stories explores the Jewish mafia of Odessa pre-WWII). Often Babel's protagonists note another character's Jewishness, but never make it clear that the author himself is a Jew. There are even ambiguous digs at Jewesses or old rabbis. This could be read as another example of Babel's ironic sense of humour or perhaps he was just giving his (Russian, Ukrainian) readers what they wanted.
Born in Odessa in 1894, Babel would repeatedly run up against the Soviet authorities in his prime, first banned from writing (thus his suggestion that he was a master of the genre of silence) then arrested in 1937. He disappeared into the Soviet gulag and it only emerged in the last several years that he had died in 1939 or thereabouts, either shot or suffering from typhus (or both, accounts differ).
Joseph Roth (a writer I admire greatly) wrote with a certain tinge of nostalgia, not necessarily for his life in a shtetl, but from a longing to return to the Austro-Hungarian order that he knew as a young man. There is nothing nostalgic about Babel's stories: they are full of violence and murder, humour and terror, love and sex and longing.
Red Cavalry explores the precarious life of a soldier in the midst of the Soviet-Polish war and Babel manages to straddle both the 19th and 20th centuries in the series of stories that both represent the content of the past with the form of the future (unlikely he read James Joyce though there are similarities in terms of form).
But I am glad that Segal is doing his Tales from Odessa because this is the work that I just love. It's so funny and his protagonists find themselves in such funny situations:
They sat down at the table, Yevzel served them with vodka, and Mr Trottyburn unfurled
Socalled: this guy's a genius
his wares. From the bale he produced cigars and fine silks, cocaine and filing tools, loose tobacco from the state of Virginia and red wine that had been purchased on the island of Chios. Each article of merchandise had its own special price, each figure was washed down with Bessarabian wine that smelt of sun and bedbugs...the drunken Malayan, full of surprise, touched Lyubka's breast with his finger. He touched it with one finger, then with each finger in turn. His soft, yellow eyes hung above the table like paper lanterns on a street in China; barely audibly he began to sing, and he fell to the ground when Lyubka gave him a push with her fist. (translated by David McDuff).
The Segal Centre production is part of the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre and the music is done by the super creative and innovative musician Socalled, so it's sure to get the tone of Babel right on (if a Canadian Jewish rapper can approach a 20th century European writer). Don't worry, there are subtitles in both French and English though part of the charm of seeing anything at DWYT is actually hearing the Yiddish. Not sure if the songs are in Yiddish though I suspect they are...
I am so looking forward to this! Check out more about the Segal Centre production here. The show starts Sunday, June 16 and continues until July 7th.
So I've been reading Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger the last few days and I have to say one aspect of it is really annoying me: the long chapters. Sheesh, how am I supposed to find two hours in one sitting to read a 200 page chapter? And it's not like there are many breaks within a chapter as natural ending points either.
It might seem like a small thing but I constantly drop back in to the middle of the action (her scenes go on and on and on...) and have to re-orient myself again.
The novel is set just after WWII in rural England and is told by a local doctor whose mother was a servant in The Hundreds, a dilapidated old mansion whose family is odd and isolated. Formerly part the ruling class, the family struggles with one inept servant and Waters does what Downton Abbey tries to do (though this book pre-dates D.A.) but without the opulence or obsequiousness of "before". We only see the shabbiness and helplessness of the after.
While I am reading in bed at night, I start to get a bit sleepy and zip ahead to see how many pages are left and then realize it's going to take another hour to get through this chapter. Ugh. Then I get irritated.
You'd think I could just get lost in the story and not notice but there are too many demands on our time today. It doesn't work that way.
And I've been thinking about this, how unusual it is nowadays when so many books have short chapters or many ending points within a chapter. I always assume it's a natural breaking point for a writer, to end a scene, to stop for the day. I can't imagine how a writer spends all day writing a few pages, then returns tomorrow and has to carry on with the same conversation, the same tensions, the same scene as she did the day before.
It's a good book otherwise. I like the atmosphere she creates of the spooky old house and all the dysfunction and polite chatter that masks something lurking underneath. The protagonist is elusive, the other characters all seem to be hiding things.
I finally got around to reading Alison Bechdel's latest book, Are You My Mother? Interesting read. Not quite as engaging or as emotionally appealing as her last book Fun Homebut I still found it to be enjoyable.
The book explores Bechdel's relationship with her mother and the years of therapy she had
to endure in order to come to some kind of truce with her feelings about her. A few things stand out: Bechdel's social anxiety (not that uncommon in writers and something you get a real sense of when you see Bechdel on stage), her OCD tendencies and how they manifest themselves as an adult, the vibrance and intelligence of her mother and their (at times) fraught relationship.
The book is a testament to how literature can affect our lives: Bechdel reads Virginia Woolf's diaries and compares her own relationship to her mother (and father in parts) and Woolf's feelings about her own parents. I love these kinds of meditations on literature which give literature a role to play in understanding our lives. Bechdel is also obsessed with psychiatrist Donald Winicott (a contemporary of Woolf and of Freud) and tries hard, too, to see her own mother issues by considering them through Winicott's theories on subject, object, attachment, and true self. To me this is where the book breaks down somewhat, particularly in this day and age when so much of psychoanalysis has little cultural impact or is seen as being somewhat anachronistic.
One wonders, too, about why Bechdel seems so self-absorbed at times: as if her relationship with her own mother means something to all her readers (a short riff/discussion on the personal being universal and vice versa doesn't justify what is, essentially, her need to answer questions that not answerable in relation to her mother, her own identity, her damaged adult-hood, her troubled love life, her tendency to over identify with her therapists, etc.).
But it's a great read and the kind of book whose universe I missed when I wasn't in it. Bechdel's own vision of herself is so clearly defined and articulated and her mother is a character that is fully developed.
The need to understand her relationship with her father never caused any pause in Fun Home. There was trauma, pain, and, of course, his ultimate suicide at an age when most people are vulnerable to psychological damage. But after reading Are You My Mother and witnessing similar questions turned around in an obsessive and not wholly healthy way, I am curious now what Bechdel will do next, how she will move past these self-absorbed questions and externalize her gifts again as she did with her long-running column, Dykes to Watch Out For (though she claims that much of the action was based on her own life and the lives of her friends).
This site, Humans of New York, amazes me. It's simple, very simple: just a collection of snaps of people taken in and around New York City with a short text accompanying each. Sometimes the text is a little history of the interaction, sometimes it's a quotation, sometimes it's a response to a question the photographer asks.
But they are almost all interesting and also moving, funny, tragic, odd, annoying and surprising. Some are little gems of wisdom, like this woman:
"My town in Colombia is very beautiful. I don't travel because I want to leave my home. I travel because I need to know why I'm staying."
Though it shouldn't, it makes me feel optimistic about people when, in fact, my natural tendency is to be on the misanthropic side at times. But it reminds me that everyone has their own story, their own limitations, their own experiences, their own prejudices and what we all want out of life is strikingly similar.
Great news today! First, we've confirmed a very big star for 2014. We are all very happy around here because this writer will be a major highlight for our 2014 Festival.
Mysterious writer confirmed for 2014!
Mark the dates! Our 2014 Festival will take place April 29 to May 4, 2014 and, yes, will be held again at Hotel 10 in downtown Montreal.
So far we have two writers confirmed and about 185 to go!
Hint #1 about big name 2014 writer: this writer doesn't write in English...
